Sermon by Mark Wakefield on 6th July 2008
Genesis 24.34-38, 42-49, 58-end/Romans 7.15-25a/Matthew 11.16-19, 25-end 

A few months ago I found myself in my local chemists in a state of some irritation.  I don't like shopping at the best of times - not unless it's for books, wine or food - and on this particular day what should have been a simple shopping trip was turning out to be anything but.

The reason for my irritation was that the hair gel I'd been using for years was not just out of stock but no longer in production, so I had to find another one.  Easy you might think, except that there in front of me was the most bewildering array of choice imaginable.  

Did I want "Ultra strong power hold gel" or "Ultra strong mess constructor"?   Or what about a "Volumising whipped mousse" or a "Volumising spritz" or even something that boasted "Extreme hold elastic resistance"?  In all there were, I estimate, 30-40 such products, all with equally crazy names.  

Marketing people tell us that there is a new kind of male consumer they call a "metrosexual".  Metrosexuals are men whose patron saint is David Beckham and who apparently love to go shopping for clothes and accessories and who think nothing of blowing lots of money on male grooming products such as hair gels, exfoliating creams and moisturisers.  This then, was clearly a  metrosexual's paradise.

Choice like this is - of course - what a consumer society is all about: a society in which every conceivable desire, however personal and specific, increasingly expects to be satisfied.   

Now I must stress here that I'm not against either choice or wealth.  It would be hypocritical of me to say otherwise, although I must say that having the choice of 30-40 types of hair care product seems to me almost as useless as having none.  But one of the problems with having all our desires pandered to is that we can so easily become spoilt and end up confusing what we want with what we really need.  

It's spoilt behaviour that Jesus is talking about in today's gospel.  Jesus asks: "To what will I compare this generation?" And he likens it to a bunch of kids, so fickle and contrary that they can't decide which game to play because none of them are quite right.   Along comes John the Baptist, a wild ascetic character who neither eats nor drinks and they say he's got a demon.  Then comes Jesus who loves eating, drinking and making merry and they say "look! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!"  

Because they're so selfish and inward-looking they can only judge Jesus and John the Baptist by the standards of what they want.  Consequently they are deaf to that one thing they really need - the life-giving message of salvation.  

This deafness is all too recognisable, both in ourselves and other people.  But I suspect that in some key respects it's even more prevalent now than in Jesus' time and I think the reason for this goes a lot deeper than the fact that we are so rich compared to previous generations and that it helps explain why people find it so difficult to have faith these days.

What, after all, is it that underlies the material wealth that we now enjoy here in Britain and in so many western nations?  The answer is quite simple: it's the extraordinary advances in science and technology that we've witnessed, particularly in the last hundred years or so and that seem still to be gathering pace.  On a very minor level it's this, of course, that explains why we have 40 different kinds of hair gel to choose from and why the exciting electronic and electrical goods we buy seem to be obsolete within months of purchase.   

But look wider than that - look at the advances in computing and the fact that the internet is probably at about the same level of development now as the car was in the early 20^th century.  Look at our understanding of genetics and the unlocking of the human genome and at our ability to look ever deeper into space and everywhere science seems triumphant.  There seems to be no secret it can't unravel, no frontier beyond which it cannot go.  

Now as I said, I'm not knocking any of this.  I was the first person in my family to go to university and I know that I owe my exciting and fulfilled life to the chances that I've been given courtesy of a rich and successful society.  But the advance of science has too often come at the price of real human understanding.  

What I mean by this is that whole scientific enterprise is founded - absolutely necessarily - on knowledge that you can prove beyond doubt.  In other words, the kind of knowledge that you gain by a process of measurement and experimentation.  The difficulty though, is that science has proved so awesomely powerful that a lot of people either explicitly or implicitly believe that this is the only kind of knowledge worth having.  

But what about the other kind of knowledge - knowledge that's based on intuition and experience and, in the case of religion, revelation as well?  This kind of knowledge is all about the human heart and its workings - its motivations,  its values and its passions.  

The writer Karen Armstrong makes this point in her book "The Battle for God", a wonderful history of religion that describes the rise of fundamentalism.  In it she explains that up until the modern era - by which she means the 17^th  century onwards - these two kinds of knowledge - knowledge of the head and knowledge of the heart - had always coexisted and always been viewed as essential to human life and health.  The religious kind of knowledge - "mythos" to use the Greek term - has always been about meaning and it speaks its truth through stories that are not necessarily literally true but that tell us essential truth about what it is to be human and in so doing helps us to lead good and happy lives.

The scientific kind of knowledge - or "logos" to use the Greek term - by contrast relates only to facts.  We gain it exclusively by the use of reason and it enables us to function efficiently and well in the world so that, for instance, we can feed and house ourselves and cure illnesses.

And one of the key differences between the two different kinds of knowledge is that whereas science is always about the discovery of something new, the religious kind of knowledge is about what's timeless and constant in life.   

You see this clearly in the New Testament.  Of course as Christians we believe that God did something unique and new in the person of Jesus.   But Jesus's core message - that of the need for social justice, of reaching out to the poor, the oppressed and the outcast - was in key respects nothing new.  Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos - if the Old Testament is about anything it's about God's call for us to live in right and just relationship with each other and with Him.  And what frustrated Jesus was precisely what frustrated his prophet forbears - namely the deafness of his fellowmen to this eternal, live-giving message.

Now, put like this of course, it seems blindingly obvious that we need both kinds of knowledge - that of the heart and that of the head - to live full and proper lives.  And yet, arguably, ever since scientific learning really took off, religion has often been written off as nothing more than superstition, the kind of mumbo jumbo that any modern, right-thinking person should have no truck with.   Today, that thinking is very much alive, and last Wednesday we played host, in our summer lecture series,  to one of its most prominent proponents, Professor A C Grayling.  

What marks the militant atheists' thinking is a withering disdain for anyone who doesn't agree with them.  Professor Grayling for instance, has said that "religious belief of all kinds shares the same intellectual respectability… as belief in the existence of fairies."  So that's some of the history's greatest intellects such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas dismissed in a single sentence.  

Richard Dawkins, that other great atheist firebrand, has gone as far as suggesting that atheists should collectively call themselves "brights", on account of those of religious faith being so obviously and obstinately misguided or - much more likely - dimwitted.  

It's just this intellectual pride that Jesus is talking about in today's gospel when he thanks his father for hiding his message of salvation from the wise and the intelligent and revealing it to infants.  In other words, you don't need to be sophisticated or clever to win salvation but you do need a measure of humility and ears to hear.  The message is hidden from the wise and the intelligent precisely because they can't conceive of any truth or knowledge that is beyond the reach of human reason.  But as the great 17th century French philosopher and mathematician Pascal said so pithily "the heart has reasons that reason cannot know."

Now, Professors Grayling and Dawkins may be at something of an extreme on the question of religious belief but I don't think there's any denying that their basic outlook still holds sway to the extent that those of us who have faith can often feel inferior, almost guilty because we cannot prove what we believe to be true.  

And yet, while science may have achieved the most wonderful things and have helped all of us to live better lives, what it can never do is help us to understand the meaning of our lives and so guide us in how to live them.

And without meaning and purpose, we sink into despair.  Without meaning and purpose we've no real sense of ourselves, of who we are, what we are and what we need, as opposed to what we think we need.  Without meaning and purpose we'll be forever at the whim of whatever's new and catches our fancy but never satisfies us.  

It may not be trendy to believe.  We may be mocked for doing so but the church exists to stand witness to the eternal truth about mankind without which it will perish.  

One thing on which I did agree with Professor Grayling is that we are living in dangerous times as militant atheists and fundamentalists square up to each other in an ugly and bitter war of words that threatens us all.

The funny thing is that they are so alike each other in their complete confidence that they alone are in possession of the truth.  And of course, they look on people like us with disdain, the one side attacking us for our lack of reason, the other for our lack of faith.

Well, we owe it both to ourselves and to this broken world of ours to at last find the courage to stand up for what we believe in and to proclaim loudly - and with great pride - that we value both faith and reason, believing as we do that without a healthy respect for both, mankind will not just be impoverished but imperilled as well.

Amen